Lords, and urged some of their arguments against it in terms of ominous warning. It is curious to find a speaker in this debate telling the Government that the strength of the legal union that existed between England and Scotland depended entirely upon the way in which the people of Scotland were treated by the majority in the two Houses. If any encroachment be made, the speaker urged, on those articles which have been stipulated between the two countries, the legal union will be of little force; the Scotch people will be apt to ascribe to the present Royal family all the ills they feel or imagine they feel; and if they should unanimously join in a contrary interest they would be supported by a powerful party in England as well as by a powerful party beyond the seas. For such reasons the speaker urged that any insult, or seeming insult, to the people of Scotland was especially to be avoided, and any disrespect to the Scotch judges would be looked upon by the whole nation as a violation of the Articles of Union and an indignity to the Scottish people.

The use of such words in the House of Lords within two-and-twenty years of the rising of 1715 ought to have been found most significant. No one who was present and who heard those words could guess indeed that within little more than eight years Scotland and England would witness a rising yet more formidable than that of the Old Pretender, a rising which would put for a moment in serious peril the Hanoverian hold of the throne. But they might well

1737.

A PACIFIC CONCLUSION.

89

have been accepted as of the gravest import by those who voted for the attendance of the Scotch judges at the Bar of the House of Lords, and who carried their point by a majority of twelve.

The question of the judges being settled, the debate on the Bill went on, and the measure was read a third time on Wednesday, May 11, and passed by a majority of fifty-four to twenty-two. On the following Monday, May 16, the Bill was sent down to the House of Commons, where it occasioned debates even warmer than the debates in the Upper House. The Scotch opposition was more successful in the Commons than it had been in the Lords. So strenuously was the measure opposed that at one time it seemed likely to be lost altogether, and was only saved from extinction by a casting vote. When at last it was read a third time, on June 13, it was a very different measure, in name and in form, from the Bill which had come down from the Peers a month earlier. The proposal to abolish the Edinburgh city guard and to destroy the gate of the Netherbow port disappeared from the Bill, and the proposed measures of punishment finally resolved themselves into the infliction of a fine of two thousand pounds upon the city of Edinburgh, and the declaration that the Provost, Alexander Wilson, was incapable of holding office. Such was the pacific conclusion of a controversy that at one time seemed likely to put a dangerous strain upon the amicable relations between the two countries. It may indeed be shrewdly suspected that the memory of the Porteous.

mob, and of the part which the Hanoverian Queen and the Whig Government played in connection with it, had no inconsiderable share in fanning the embers of Jacobite enthusiasm in Scotland, in swelling the ranks of the sympathisers with King James and Prince Charles over the water, and in precipitating the insurrectionary storm which was to make memorable the name of the Forty-Five. Perhaps, however, to the world at large the most momentous result of that wild and stormy episode is to be found in the enchanting fiction which has illuminated, with the genius of Walter Scott, the stirring scenes of the Porteous riots, and has lent an air of heroic dignity and beauty to the obscure smuggler, George Robertson. It is the happy privilege of the true romancist to find history his handmaid, and to make obscure events immortal, whether they be the scuffles of Greeks and barbarians outside a small town in Asia Minor, or the lynching of a dissolute adventurer by an Edinburgh mob in the Grassmarket.

CHAPTER XXV.

FAMILY JARS.

How is the wind now for the King?' 'Like the nation—against him.' Such was the question put, and such the answer promptly given, by two persons meeting in a London street during certain stormy days of December 1736. The King had been on a visit to his loved Hanover. When the royal yachts were returning, some fierce tempests sprang up and raged along both coasts; and the King's vessel was forced to return to Helvoetsluys, in Holland, from which she had sailed. She had parted company with some of the other vessels. The storms continued to rage, and the King, who had been most reluctant to leave Hanover, was wild with impatience to get away from Helvoetsluys. Having had to take leave of Madame Walmoden, he was now anxious to get back to the Queen. He sailed for Helvoetsluys while the tempest was still not wholly allayed, and another tempest seemed likely to spring up. News travelled slowly in those times, and there were successive intervals of several days, during which the English Court and the English public did not know whether George was safe in a port, or was drifting on a wreck, or was lying at the bottom of the sea.

6

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That was a trying time for the Queen and those who stood by her. George the Second was just then very unpopular in London, and indeed all over England. The King's danger,' Lord Hervey says, ' did not in the least soften the minds of the people towards him; a thousand impertinent and treasonable reflections were thrown out against him every day publicly in the streets-such as wishing him at the bottom of the sea; that he had been drowned instead of some of the poor sailors that had been washed off the decks-and many other affectionate douceurs in the same style.' A man went into an alehouse where several soldiers were drinking; he addressed them as brave English boys,' and called on them to drink 'damnation to your master.' The man went on to argue that there was no reason why the English people should not hate the King, and that the King had gone to Hanover only to spend the money of England there, and to bring back his Hanoverian mistress. There is not much in this of any particular importance; but there is significance in what followed. The man was arrested, and the sergeant who was with the soldiers when the invitation to drink was given went to Sir Robert Walpole to tell him what had happened. Sir Robert thanked the sergeant and rewarded him, but enjoined him to leave out of the affidavit he would have to make any allusion to the English money and the Hanoverian mistress. There was quite enough in the mere invitation to drink the disloyal toast, Sir Robert said, to secure the offender's punishment; but the Prime